Wow, 4 years already?
The landing happens around page 30 of this thread.
The landing happens around page 30 of this thread.
Page number is a per-user setting.The landing happens around page 30 of this thread.
NASA's Opportunity Mars rover will drive down a gully carved long ago by a fluid that might have been water, according to the latest plans for the 12-year-old mission. No Mars rover has done that before.
The longest-active rover on Mars also will, for the first time, visit the interior of the crater it has worked beside for the last five years. These activities are part of a two-year extended mission that began Oct. 1, the newest in a series of extensions going back to the end of Opportunity's prime mission in April 2004.
The rover team will face challenges keeping Opportunity active for another two years. Most mechanisms onboard still function well, but motors and other components have far exceeded their life expectancy. Opportunity's twin, Spirit, lost use of two of its six wheels before succumbing to the cold of its fourth Martian winter in 2010. Opportunity will face its eighth Martian winter in 2017. Use of Opportunity's non-volatile "flash" memory for holding data overnight was discontinued last year, so results of each day's observations and measurements must be transmitted that day or lost.
Two of the raised treads, called grousers, on the left middle wheel of NASA's Curiosity Mars rover broke during the first quarter of 2017, including the one seen partially detached at the top of the wheel in this image from the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) camera on the rover's arm.
Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
A routine check of the aluminum wheels on NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover has found two small breaks on the rover’s left middle wheel—the latest sign of wear and tear as the rover continues its journey, now approaching the 10-mile (16 kilometer) mark.
The mission's first and second breaks in raised treads, called grousers, appeared in a March 19 image check of the wheels, documenting that these breaks occurred after the last check, on Jan. 27.
The monitoring of wheel damage on Curiosity, plus a program of wheel-longevity testing on Earth, was initiated after dents and holes in the wheels were seen to be accumulating faster than anticipated in 2013. Testing showed that at the point when three grousers on a wheel have broken, that wheel has reached about 60 percent of its useful life. Curiosity already has driven well over that fraction of the total distance needed for reaching the key regions of scientific interest on Mars' Mount Sharp.
Maybe a chance for some space-crazed entrepreneur to fly to Mars and swap tires...
Maybe a chance for some space-crazed entrepreneur to fly to Mars and swap tires...
:lol:
Now I have an image of a SpaceX tow truck stuck in my mind.
I was thinking more of Mark Watney.:lol::lol::lol:
Weird that this thread is so dead of late...
What amazes me is the blue sky!
Keith's Note: NASA recently posted an image taken by the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) aboard NASA's Mars rover Curiosity. A reader from Australia contacted me to point out some curious structures within the rock featured in that image.
As it says in the end of the video, the colors were white-balanced to appear as if it was on Earth, to help geologists identify stuff.
So, nope. Not true color.
I can, however, make a prediction that this or similar image would end up on conspiracy theorists's sites with claims of coverup of... something... on Mars.